7
Stalking 101
BROKENHEARTED
The time has come.
Right through the binoculars, I stood in the building across from Zola’s apartment and watched them see my surprise. Adrenaline rushed up my spine.
Love will come from this. I know it.
Sometimes, my dick grew hard off my own genius.
How long had I been waiting? How long had I been watching her?
I’d started two months ago, and I’d only had time to follow her around for a month. The next month, I killed for love. But now, it was time to return to the game.
The time has come. All my watching. All my noting. It all comes to this week.
Zola lived in a one-room penthouse in Brooklyn. Although worth a good bit of money, she’d made do with a little furniture and a lot of books. When she wasn’t on a modeling job, she rose at noon and ran in Battery Park.
On her sunny off-days, she read by the window until the moon rose. Then, she shifted to her bedroom and fell asleep with the book open and her face halfway off the pillow.
On her rainy off-days, she lounged in Sampson’s café, nodding her head to classical music, stuck in a book and sipping their finest java.
She posted none of this on her social media, barely giving life to her online persona.
She was worth close to three million due to her new deal with Natural Health Cigarettes and Siguoni Purses. She held two savings accounts and one checking. Her brother York invested her money in stocks. He never skimmed or stole. Meanwhile, Zola gave money to at least one homeless person she walked by, even if they looked more like drug addict than down on their luck. She’d started a charity called Hunter’s Run. It would be launched in a year. The details were in an unguarded folder on her computer labeled Top Secret. The proposal discussed helping children of abused parents. It would cover any of the kids’ legal, medical, living, and even psychological expenses.
I’m sorry to do this to you, Zola. But I must.
She wasn’t a bad person and was completely underserving of the chaos in these upcoming weeks. Although financially independent, she lived like a school teacher. Not much outrageous shopping, although it appeared that several designers let her take clothes home.
She liked to write. I’d snuck in and read some of her notebooks. It was always stories with amazing beginnings, but no middles or ends. I think she had a respect for words but didn’t really know how to organize them.
Therefore, she read more than anything else in her life and had a high grocery bill for her weekend book fests.
I had cameras all over her reading area.
When she dug into a romance novel, she always ate braised duck, tiny roasted potatoes, and brandied brussel sprouts with red wine. She stopped eating during the sex scenes, as if unable to focus on munching and the sex at the same time. When the couple got their happy ending, she had pie.
For the mysteries, she consumed hordes of red meats with thick gravies and bowls of rice as if preparing to survive in some deadly adventure and needing all her strength. Beer came with any murder scene. She gorged on thick salted caramel malts at the killer’s reveal.
Science fiction called for bacon.
For fantasies, she went vegan—roasted vegetables and brown rice. Lots of nuts and green smoothies.
For some reason, she masturbated in the second act of a fantasy. It was as if world-building made her horny. It was in those times when she would slip her hands down into her yoga pants, let the book fall to her side, and rub her pussy up and down, moaning as she pinched her nipples with the other hand.
This was Zola.
Putting the binoculars down, I closed the curtain and left the window. The dead old woman still lay on the floor right where I’d left her. Her skin had rotted, and the stench had become unbearable. Soon, the neighbors would complain.
I lit a Natural Health cigarette and considered my options. I wasn’t a fan of smoking, but I needed to slip into Zola’s skin, experience what she did…be around the things she’d been around.
I can’t lift the old woman and take her anywhere. And she’s dead. I’m not touching her now. Things would take me.
I exhaled the smoke and stared at the rotting woman. “We’ll just have to set you on fire. There’s no other way.”
The dead woman was the least of my worries.
Time was moving fast.
I headed back to a crappy apartment, several blocks away from Zola’s. I’d rented it two months ago. In this neighborhood, the homeless huddled under crumbled boxes in back alleys. There was always a stench in the air of urine and unwashed bodies. Most were broke. They didn’t live off money. They survived on misery. They didn’t walk the street at nights and barely enjoyed doing it during the day. And they damn sure had no time to look at who was coming and going.